


the purest sin

by middlecyclone



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, F/F, Rule 63, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2014-09-12
Packaged: 2018-02-17 01:38:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2292176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlecyclone/pseuds/middlecyclone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frances looks up at Camilla’s tiny blonde figure, hunched in one of Charles’ oversized sweaters, her eyeliner smeared and her freckles stark against her milky skin, and she wants desperately to kiss her, wants to wrap her hands around Camilla’s impossibly narrow wrists and slide their mouths together, hot and wet and messy in a clash of teeth. She knows that Camilla will taste like smoke and gin and violets, and she knows that Camilla will kiss her back, if she makes the first move. She doesn't, though. Not yet.</p><p>Or, a Francis Abernathy character study, if Francis was a girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the purest sin

**Author's Note:**

> As you can see from the tags, there's one scene that's a little shaky on consent, and another scene with something that could be considered suicidal ideation. It should be significantly less triggering than the book, though.
> 
> I promise the pairing makes more sense than it seems like at first.
> 
> Thanks to the ever-wonderful [Sriya](http://peppermoonchilds.tumblr.com) for being my wonderful beta. Any spelling or grammar errors, however, belong fully to me.

Her grandmother only calls her Franny once. She is six years old, knees scabbed from tripping over perpetually untied laces, face streaked with tears after being stung by a bee.

“Shh, Franny darling, it’s all right,” she croons, tucking greasy strands of red hair behind a tiny pale ear. “You’ll be all right, I promise.”

Frances stares back at her, petulant, her small red mouth tightening at the corners and an icy, defiant glare coming into her eyes. “Don’t call me that,” she says, voice shaky with pain, her tone an insistent whine. “That’s not my name.”

Her grandmother sighs. “All right, then, dear,” she clucks, “no more of that then. Off with you, Frances.” She tries to pull the girl in for a hug, but Frances pulls away, no longer in need of comfort.

Her mother never even tries.

* * *

Bunny calls her Franny over and over again, and every time, she hates it as much as the first.

“Stop calling me that,” she snaps at him, over and over again, but he always just laughs and brushes it off.

Sometimes he tells her, “stop overreacting,” and flashes his straight white teeth in a smug grin. Those times are the best. Other times he rolls his eyes, mocking and cruel, and says, “it’s just a nickname; there’s no need to get your panties in a twist.”

And sometimes he doesn’t say anything at all and just looks at her, cool and direct and unreadable, and something about it sends nasty shivers up her spine.

Regardless of what Bunny does, Frances never responds, because there is never anything else she can possibly say. 

* * *

“There’s simply no talking to him when he’s like that,” Camilla tells her consolingly, one evening after Bunny has laughed at her and then left.

“I know,” Frances sighs, and lights another cigarette. “It’s just – I’m not a Franny. Frannys are fat old women with hair dyed blue, or cutesy little girls with pigtails and crooked teeth, or frumpy middle-aged housewives who hate their husbands and their children and their lives. And that’s not me, and I hate how he’s trying to make me somebody I’m not, because he doesn’t like the way I am right now, and I hate – I just hate Bunny, sometimes, God.”

“You don’t mean that,” Camilla says softly, in her voice like wind chimes, and Francis sighs.

“I do, a little,” she confesses, low and dark. “Not all the times. But sometimes.”

Camilla just twitches the corners of her mouth up into the barest smile, and squeezes Frances’ hand.

Frances looks up at Camilla’s tiny blonde figure, hunched in one of Charles’ oversized sweaters, her eyeliner smeared and her freckles stark against her milky skin, and she wants desperately to kiss her, wants to wrap her hands around Camilla’s impossibly narrow wrists and slide their mouths together, hot and wet and messy in a clash of teeth. She knows that Camilla will taste like smoke and gin and violets, and she knows that Camilla will kiss her back, if she makes the first move.

She doesn’t, though. Not today. 

* * *

Frances doesn’t know how Camilla can stand it.

She doesn’t mind being looked at in general – in fact, she invites it, with her bright hair and her dark, out-of-place clothes. But any time anyone looks at her with serious intent, it feels like spiders crawling across her skin, like her world has been knocked slightly askew in the most disconcerting and upsetting way imaginable.

Usually Frances is able to exude a certain air of being untouchable, unattainable, undesirable. Alien. Men look at her and immediately look away, uncomfortable. It’s something to do with the looseness of her shirts, the way she never wears anything but trousers, the harsh angles of her face and her strict, upper-class bearing. 

Once in a while, though, someone sees past her carefully constructed façade. Not Henry, never Henry – but Charles, sometimes. Camilla. And now, unfortunately, Richard.

“Look,” Frances tells him, late one afternoon, the two of them sprawled out on her aunt’s front lawn, “I’m sorry, but I just want to get this out of the way. I’m really not attracted to you. Not that you aren’t—that is, I’m just—“

She heaves a frustrated sigh and stares down at the ground, where her fingertips are stained green from where she’s been pulling up blades of grass. There’s an earthworm tentatively poking its head out of the soil, and she strokes it gently, feeling the silky undulations of its tiny body, before it withdraws back into the damp black dirt.

“I just don’t,” she finishes finally, “and I’m sorry. I just thought you should probably know.”

“I’m not exactly attracted to you, either,” Richard snaps, after a long awkward pause, “so that works out well, then.” He forces a cool smile at her, and then takes a large sip from his wine glass, seemingly uncaring.

He’s lying, though.

There’s too much heat behind his words, too much anger in his eyes for it to be the truth. And Frances has felt the way he acts towards her – too pushy, too warm, to eager-to-please. 

Nobody ever wants to please Frances, not ever, unless they want something. And Frances knows what Richard wants from her, and it is something that she is not willing, or able, to give.

She smiles back, just as cool and distant as Richard is, and drains her own glass in one long, smooth swallow.

* * *

“Why do you bother with all this?” Frances asks, sprawled languid and graceless across Camilla’s bed, watching her slip into yet another frilly white dress. “It’s not like it’s fooling anyone, you know. You might look like an angel, but anyone who’s ever spoken to you sees past it in a second.”

Camilla looks at her in the mirror and raises one elegant eyebrow. “’Look like th' innocent flower, but be the serpent under 't,” she intones. Frances just sighs.

“Oh, what nonsense,” she says. “Macbeth is so dreary. Honestly, there’s no point in looking beautiful and meek just to keep everyone around you complacent. Look like a wasp and act like a wasp and sting like a wasp, is what I always say.”

Camilla turns around then, and stares at Frances, face unreadable. And then she smiles, wry and twisted, and shakes her head. 

“Easy for you to say, Miss Debutante,” she teases lightly, “I know we’re all white and Anglo-Saxon, but the Abernathys take it farther than most.”

“Excuse you, I’m Catholic,” Frances retorts loftily, and laughs, almost against her will, the sound coming out louder than she expects in the quiet, churchlike bedroom. Camilla laughs too, softer and gentler, and Frances still desperately, achingly  
wants to kiss her.

And yet still she does not.

* * *

“You could be pretty if you tried,” Bunny says, for the fifth or possibly the fiftieth time, and Frances sighs. She feels Richard’s eyes flick towards her in exasperated sympathy and she appreciates it, but she would appreciate it a lot more if he would stop it with the sympathetic glances and just tell Bunny to shut the fuck up.

“Really,” he continues, oblivious to way Frances is seething with irritation, “if you would just stop wearing that horrid black coat and brush your hair once in a while, you’d have all the guys on campus chasing after you.”

“I don’t want all the guys on campus chasing me,” Frances snaps. “In fact, I’d really prefer they’d leave me alone forever.”

Bunny waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, you say that now, but in five years you’ll be desperate for a husband, trying to pop out a kid or five. All girls are like that.”

“No,” Frances repeats, “I really don’t want that.”

“Bunny,” Richard interjects, “really, let her be,” and Frances is surprisingly, overwhelmingly grateful to him, as awful as he can be sometimes.

“Come on, Franny,” Bunny laughs, “I’m just joking,” and Frances freezes.

“Don’t –“ she starts, and then sighs, giving up, tucking her hair behind her ears and staring down at her Greek textbook. It’s pointless with Bunny, she knows this. He always manages to accidentally stumble across all the things that make her more upset than anything, and he doesn’t even realize.

Frances knows it’s futile to hate him, because she’s stuck with him, and there really is something about him that makes him so strangely charming, even for how despicable he can be.

She tries, though. And she does succeed in loathing him, at least a little, at least for now.

* * *

Charles kisses her one night, when they’re drunker than usual and the moon is starting to set in the velvet gray of the sky. 

That part isn’t especially strange. What is strange is that she kisses back.

She knows it should feel wrong. She knows that, though the hair and the skin and the quirk of the lips are right, she should be bending down instead of reaching up; knows that there should be soft slight curves and knife-sharp elbows pressed against her, not rough stubble and arcs of muscle.

She doesn’t care, though, because it doesn’t feel wrong – at least not at first. When Charles’ hands are in her hair and on her hips and skating over the planes of her face, it seems right, natural, inevitable. 

It’s only when her shirt is most of the way off and Charles’ hands are sliding up her back to unhook her bra that something snaps into place and, suddenly, a wave of wrongness and disgust crashes over her.

“Stop,” she breathes into his mouth, but he either doesn’t hear her or doesn’t notice.

“Stop,” she says again, louder, “please, stop,” and she turns her head to the side to escape his kisses, her hands going to his shoulders to try and shove him away. And her actions do nothing to physically push him back, but the feel of her fingers on his collarbones jolts him back to awareness, and he yanks himself back, his hands finding their way back to his pockets, confusion and irritation clear on his face.

“Why –“ Charles starts to say, and then cuts himself off. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“Stop,” she says again, helplessly, almost crying, crossing her arms over her chest to cover herself. “I don’t –“ she starts, and has to stop talking to take a deep breath, trying and failing to pull herself together. She’s shaking uncontrollably, and she honestly has no idea why.

“I’m sorry,” Charles says softly, and leaves.

* * *

Frances knows that the guilt will hit her later, can almost feel the acid of shame and regret building in her throat – only almost, though. Right now, she doesn’t feel anything except sick, twisted satisfaction, bubbling through her in a glorious rush of vicious glee and bursting out her mouth in a choked, hateful laugh.

Richard turns to look at her, his dark eyebrows raised in startled disapproval, and Frances bites her lip, hard, tasting the coppery rush of blood flooding into her mouth.

She looks over the edge of the cliff, at Bunny’s crumpled, broken frame, and smiles, feeling her teeth rip deeper into her lower lip and not caring, not even a little bit, not at all.

Bunny is dead, and she killed him, and she is free.

* * *

All she wants to do is scream, scream to the heavens with every ounce of energy in her body, but it feels like her chest is being crushed by some strange unknowable weight; she can’t even breathe, let alone make a noise.

It’s horrifying.

She calls Richard – later, she’s not sure why she picked Richard, besides the fact that he’s the only one of them left who’s even the slightest bit reliable these days. Richard doesn’t even like her, but he is the only one who would ever actually show up.

Frances knows that she’s dying. She doesn’t know how, or why, but she can feel the air squeezing out of her lungs and the erratic pounding of her heart. She wants to find it within herself to feel sad and regretful about her inevitable death, but those are the sorts of emotions that she does not have within her anymore. Not for this, at least.

She doesn’t even feel guilty for leaving everyone else behind. Maybe it’s selfish, but she’s happy she won’t have to keep up these impossible appearances. And, more than that, she’s slickly darkly nastily satisfied that everyone else will have to keep up these same appearances.

She’s suffered plenty, after all. Now it’s their turn.

And if she died, at least she would be free.

* * *

“I should have known you would turn out to be weak,” Henry says coldly. “I should have known you would break – you’ve always been the weakest of us all. Well, except for Bunny, I suppose.”

Frances, who had been sitting alone in the library until Henry had slid into the seat across from her, is stunned into silence.

“Of course,” Henry continues, “Bunny was weak, and we took care of him as was necessary. And if you persist in this hysterical nonsense, we will take appropriate action in your case as well.”

Frances swallows, feels ice drop into the pit of her stomach, because – well. Because Henry is serious. Because he would do it, he would, and everyone else would follow him like they had before.

“I’m not the weakest,” she says softly. “What about Charles with the alcohol? Richard and his prescription drugs? I may be going crazy, but at least I’m doing it all on my own.”

“Charles will pull through,” Henry says dismissively, “and Richard barely counts.”

“Camilla, then,” Francis counters. “If Camilla breaks, will you ‘take appropriate action’?”

Henry’s face goes even harder, then, like a metal gate crashing down over his features. “Nobody is taking action against Camilla,” he grits out, tone colder than a Siberian winter. “And she isn’t weak. She’s probably the strongest out of everyone, besides me.

“Because,” Henry leans across the table for emphasis, ”she may not have that core of nastiness you use as a shield, but that means that she, at least, is not rotting from the inside out. Her core is pure solid steel. And steel, my dear Frances, does not bend. It does not break.

“But you are not steel. You are, if anything, that fussy wrought iron that cracks in one good ice storm. Or maybe not even that. Maybe all you are, Frances, is a piece of wood. Pretty enough from the outside, and sturdy seeming at first, but all that needs to happen is a bit of water, and then you’re nothing but rot and crumble.”

Frances glares at Henry, hot tears in her eyes, unable to find the right words to spit back in his face.

“Yes,” he muses, eyes flicking up and down her body appraisingly, “I think that’s it.”

“Fuck you,” Frances whispers harshly. “Just – fuck you, Henry.”

He stares back at her, cool and measured, and smiles. “This was a nice talk,” he tells her smoothly, and walks away, moving like some sort of oversized stick insect in his dark, unseasonal suit.

Frances bites her lip until it bleeds again.

* * *

She thinks about kissing Camilla, again, for the thousandth time. She’s never done it, she’s just now realizing. Not once, not ever. It’s strange, because thinking about kissing Camilla is like a constant lowkey buzz in the back of her mind and yet she’s never done it. 

She’s come close a couple times – drunk and laughing on her aunt’s front porch, drunk and serious in Charles’ and Camilla’s kitchen, in Greek class, in the library, in the Brasserie, on the grassy commons on warm spring afternoons.  
She’s imagined it, too, over and over and over, awake and asleep and in-between, the warmth of Camilla’s skin against hers, the softness of her lips, and it seems so real in her mind—

But it isn’t.

Frances thinks about kissing Camilla. She used to think it was inevitable, but now she knows better. Now she knows it’s never going to happen. The last thing Camilla needs is to add Frances to the list of suitors, torn between Charles’ familiarity and Henry’s intensity and Richard’s relentless optimism as she already is. And the last thing Frances needs is to alienate one of the few people left on this planet that she still trusts, even though, well, she really shouldn’t trust anyone anymore, should she.

* * *

Frances goes to the funeral alone.

She’s never been to St. Louis before and, honestly, after this she has no desire to ever go back again. It’s sticky and too-hot and there’s nothing there for her but a rotting corpse buried in the red, red mud anyway.

She stands at the back of the crowd during the funeral, a safe distance from Henry’s family, sweating in her prim black suit but wracked with chills nonetheless.

She stands there until everyone else is gone, headed for some reception she knows she won’t be able to bring herself to attend, and she goes and stands right next to the grave.

“Alas, poor Yorick,” she mutters to herself, and smiles bitterly at Henry’s name on Henry’s headstone. “I guess I wasn’t the weak link after all,” she says eventually, feeling a bead of sweat drip off her nose and onto the mud of the grave. She imagines it sinking through the dirt, down and down through the layers of earth until it hits Henry’s coffin and drips through and hits Henry’s decomposing body, eventually, hits Henry’s bare, dry skeleton.

Blood from Richard, she thinks, and sweat from me. 

“Somebody else can get the tears,” she tells the dirt, “I’m not going to cry over you, Henry. I’ll miss you,” she says, “but I’m not going to cry.”

That’s only somewhat a lie.

* * *

“It’s nice to meet you, Franny,” the boy says, and his smile is kind but there’s a dull blankness behind his eyes. 

This is the man with whom Frances will have to spend the rest of her life. The man she’ll be stuck with, eating breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast again next to him. Sleeping next to him, sleeping with him, bearing his awful dull children, and never getting what she wants.

Frances has always been selfish and self-obsessed, and she’s never pretended to be otherwise. There was really never any point. But now she’s going to be forced into this loveless sham of a marriage, she won’t be allowed to be either selfish or self-obsessed. Who will she be without that? Not Frances Abernathy, probably.

Franny Jennings, she thinks to herself. If I can’t be myself anymore, I guess I’ll have to be her.

“Franny?” he repeats, reaching his hand out for a shake, and Frances smiles thinly and takes his hand.

She doesn’t bother correcting him.

* * *

The wedding dress sits on her frame all wrong, too much stiff lace and wide skirts, not enough room inside the boxy corset for Frances to even breathe.

“You look beautiful,” her mother tells her dreamily, and Frances doesn’t even bother to force a smile in return.

“Thank you,” she says listlessly, and turns to look in the mirror.

She doesn’t look like herself. She looks like a small, scared little girl, drowning in swaths of heavy lace, her pale complexion washed out even further by the stark whiteness, the curls of her hairstyle softening her usually angular features beyond recognition. She looks like a timid facsimile of herself, some bland puppet of a woman, a terrified trapped animal. She doesn’t like it, not one bit, but she figures she should probably get used to it.

It took her mother and three of her cousins to get her wedding dress on this morning. She doesn’t know if she will ever be able to take it off again.


End file.
